Phishing - (Elham Naseri)
Phishing ' ' Phishing is the act of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures. A phishing technique was described in detail in 1987, and (according to its creator) the first recorded use of the term "phishing" was made in 1995. The term is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to "baits" used in hopes that the potential victim will "bite" by clicking a malicious link or opening a malicious attachment, in which case their financial information and passwords may then be stolen ' ' History and current status of phishing A phishing technique was described in detail, in a paper and presentation delivered to the International HP Users Group, Interrex. The first recorded mention of the term "phishing" is found in the hacking tool AOHell (according to its creator), which included a function for stealing the passwords of America Online users. A recent and popular case of phishing is the suspected Chinese phishing campaign targeting Gmail accounts of highly ranked officials of the United States and South Korean’s Government, military, and Chinese political activists. The Chinese government continues to deny accusations of taking part in cyber-attacks from within its borders, but evidence has been revealed that China’s own People’s Liberation Army has assisted in the coding of cyber-attack software. Early phishing on AOL Phishing on AOL was closely associated with the warez community that exchanged pirated software and the hacking scene that perpetrated credit card fraud and other online crimes. After AOL brought in measures in late 1995 to prevent using fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to open accounts, AOL crackers resorted to phishing for legitimate accounts and exploiting AOL. A phisher might pose as an AOL staff member and send an instant message to a potential victim, asking him to reveal his password. In order to lure the victim into giving up sensitive information the message might include imperatives such as "verify your account" or "confirm billing information". Once the victim had revealed the password, the attacker could access and use the victim's account for fraudulent purposes or spamming. Both phishing and warezing on AOL generally required custom-written programs, such as AOHell. Phishing became so prevalent on AOL that they added a line on all instant messages stating: "no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information", though even this didn't prevent some people from giving away their passwords and personal information if they read and believed the IM first. A user using both an AIM account and an AOL account from an ISP simultaneously could phish AOL members with relative impunity as internet AIM accounts could be used by non-AOL internet members and could not be actioned (i.e.- reported to AOL TOS department for disciplinary action.) Eventually, AOL's policy enforcement with respect to phishing and warez became stricter and forced pirated software off AOL servers. AOL simultaneously developed a system to promptly deactivate accounts involved in phishing, often before the victims could respond. The shutting down of the warez scene on AOL caused most phishers to leave the service. The term "phishing" is said to have been coined by well known mid-1990s spammer and hacker Khan C Smith, and its use was quickly adopted by warez groups throughout AOL. AOL enforcement would detect words used in aol chat rooms to suspend the accounts individuals involved in pirating software and trading stolen accounts. The term was used because '<><' is the single most common tag of HTML that was found in all chat transcripts naturally, and as such could not be detected or filtered by AOL staffThe symbol <>< was replaced for any wording that referred to stolen credit cards, accounts, or illegal activity. Since the symbol looked like a fish, and due to the popularity of phreaking, it was adapted as "phishing". Transition from AOL to financial institutions The capture of AOL account information may have led phishers to misuse credit card information, and to the realization that attacks against online payment systems were feasible. The first known direct attempt against a payment system affected E-gold in June 2001, which was followed up by a "post-9/11 id check" shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Both were viewed at the time as failures, but can now be seen as early experiments towards more fruitful attacks against mainstream banks. By 2004, phishing was recognized as a fully industrialized part of the economy of crime: specializations emerged on a global scale that provided components for cash, which were assembled into finished attacks. Phishing techniques Recent phishing attempts Phishers are targeting the customers of banks and online payment services. E-mails, supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service, have been used to glean sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers. While the first such examples were sent indiscriminately in the expectation that some would be received by customers of a given bank or service, recent research has shown that phishers may in principle be able to determine which banks potential victims use, and target bogus e-mails accordingly. Social networking sites are now a prime target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft; in late 2006 a computer worm took over pages on MySpace and altered links to direct surfers to websites designed to steal login details. Experiments show a success rate of over 70% for phishing attacks on social networks. The RapidShare file sharing site has been targeted by phishing to obtain a premium account, which removes speed caps on downloads, auto-removal of uploads, waits on downloads, and cooldown times between uploads. Attackers who broke into TD Ameritrade's database (containing all 6.3 million customers' social security numbers, account numbers and email addresses as well as their names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and trading activity) also wanted the account usernames and passwords, so they launched a follow-up spear phishing attack. Almost half of phishing thefts in 2006 were committed by groups operating through the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Business_Network Russian Business Network] based in St. Petersburg. For more current worldwide examples, see Phish of the Month. There are anti-phishing websites which publish exact messages that have been recently circulating the internet, such as FraudWatch International and Millersmiles. Such sites often provide specific details about the particular messages. Nowadays to reduce working with the source code of web pages, Hackers have implemented a phishing tool called Super Phisher that makes the work easy when compared to manual method of creating a phishing websites. List of phishing techniques Phishing Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Spear Phishing Phishing attempts directed at specific individuals or companies have been termed [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spearphishing spearphishing]. Attackers may gather personal information about their target to increase their probability of success. Clone Phishing A type of phishing attack whereby a legitimate, and previously delivered, email containing an attachment or link has had its content and recipient address(es) taken and used to create an almost identical or cloned email. The attachment or Link within the email is replaced with a malicious version and then sent from an email address spoofed to appear to come from the original sender. It may claim to be a re-send of the original or an updated version to the original. This technique could be used to pivot (indirectly) from a previously infected machine and gain a foothold on another machine, by exploiting the social trust associated with the inferred connection due to both parties receiving the original email. Whaling Several recent phishing attacks have been directed specifically at senior executives and other high profile targets within businesses, and the term whaling has been coined for these kinds of attacks. Link manipulation Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an e-mail (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers. In the following example URL, http://www.yourbank.example.com/, it appears as though the URL will take you to the example section of the yourbank website; actually this URL points to the "yourbank" (i.e. phishing) section of the example website. Another common trick is to make the displayed text for a link (the text between the tags) suggest a reliable destination, when the link actually goes to the phishers' site. The following example link, //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine, appears to direct the user to an article entitled "Genuine"; clicking on it will in fact take the user to the article entitled "Deception". In the lower left hand corner of most browsers users can preview and verify where the link is going to take them. Hovering your cursor over the link for a couple of seconds may do a similar thing, but this can still be set by the phisher. A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of Internationalized domain names (IDN) in web browsers, that might allow visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly malicious, websites. Despite the publicity surrounding the flaw, known as IDN spoofing or homograph attack, phishers have taken advantage of a similar risk, using open URL redirectors on the websites of trusted organizations to disguise malicious URLs with a trusted domain. Even digital certificates do not solve this problem because it is quite possible for a phisher to purchase a valid certificate and subsequently change content to spoof a genuine website. Filter evasion Phishers have used images instead of text to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing e-mails.